Update:
Beware: Radio Rooftop Malta May Have Tried to Cheat Us. Check Your Bill Before You Pay
We have eaten here many times and never once looked at the itemised bill. We live close by, we order the same things, we pay and we go.
This time we looked.
The sashimi was on the bill twice. The Sashimi Selection we always order, 10 pieces at €38, had been charged twice on a single visit. We pointed it out. They admitted the mistake and took it off. Fine — that happens, and they fixed it.
Then we looked at the next bill properly. Looks like a deliberate miscalculation to gain €2 extra.
The dish 10pcs Sashimi had been split into two lines: nigiri at €32 for four pieces, and one more nigiri at €8. That comes to €40 for what the menu prices at €38.
We pointed that out too, and it was not corrected; we just paid and left. Forever! We do not recommend this Maletse Radio Rooftop to our readers. Not worth it. We want to relax for our money, not fight over a 2-euro extra bill with people who want to cheat us.
So: twice in a row, on the same dish, the bill came out in the restaurant’s favour. Not once in ours.
Two euros is nothing. That is exactly the point. If they are willing to try it on for two euros with regulars who come in every few weeks, assume it can happen to a tourist who is up here once, looking at the view, and signing the slip without reading it.
What we do now, every time:
- Ask for the itemised bill, not just the total
- Check the sushi and sashimi lines against the printed menu price — that is where it happened to us, twice
- Watch for one dish split across two lines, which is how the second one was done
- Query it on the spot. Both times it was corrected without an argument
None of this changes the view, the gyoza or the Maltese sparkling. It changes how we pay for them.
Radio Rooftop Malta Review
We live next door. We have been going to Radio Rooftop for several months, we order roughly the same things every time, and until recently we paid without checking the bill.
Then we read it. The sashimi we always order, €38 on the menu, had been charged twice. We said so, and they took it off. Fine, a mistake.
The next time, the same dish was split into two lines of nigiri — €32 and €8 — which comes to €40 for something priced at €38. We said so again, and again it was corrected.
Twice in a row, in their favour. Never in ours. Two euros is nothing, and that is exactly the point: if they will try it on for two euros with regulars who live round the corner, what happens to a tourist who is up here once, looking at the view, signing the slip without reading it?
Do not trust the bill at Radio Rooftop Malta. Check it.
“Do not trust the bill. They tried it twice on us — and we live next door.”
The 360-Degree View, and the Best Time to See It
Radio has a view that goes the whole way around, which is less common than the phrase suggests — most rooftops have a lift shaft or a taller neighbor taking out part of the horizon.
Twenty floors is modest by the standards of the world’s tallest hotels with rooftop bars, but Malta is low and flat and very little is built above it. From up here you get St Julian’s below you, Sliema and the Valletta skyline down the coast, the open Mediterranean on the other side, and the interior of the island stretching away behind. On a clear evening you can pick out Gozo.
One thing to know if you don’t like heights. The edge is glass — thin, completely clear, floor to waist — so standing near it feels like there is less between you and St Julian’s than there actually is. It’s fine once you’ve sat down, but the first walk to the rail is a moment. A few of the panels were cracked when we were there. We didn’t ask.
On the question everyone asks: Radio is often described online as the highest bar in Malta. It isn’t, quite. TwentyTwo sits on Level 22 of the Portomaso Business Tower, a taller building along the coast, and Ánima occupies Level 33 of Mercury Tower itself. What Radio has is the clearest all-round view of the three, at an hour when there’s still light, and without a nightclub dress code.
Go for sunset. The bar opens at 18:00 and the two hours after that are the best of it. Later on it turns into something else — DJs, louder, a dressier crowd. That’s fine too, but the view is the reason to come and you want light for it.
Mercury Towers: What Zaha Hadid Actually Built in St Julian’s
Mercury Towers is worth a few minutes of attention before you get in the lift.
It is not one building but several. The tall one — Mercury Tower, 122 metres, the tallest building in Malta — is residential, and it is not the one you are drinking on. Radio sits on top of the shorter tower beside it, the twenty-floor block housing ME Malta.
Between and beneath them are the piazza, the mall and the old Mercury House. The complex was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects — one of the last projects Hadid signed off personally before she died in 2016, and the practice’s second job for ME by Meliá after ME Dubai. Developed by J. Portelli Projects, it took until 2023 to finish.
The shape is the part people notice. The tower turns partway up, a twist through the middle of the building that isn’t decoration: it swings the upper floors around to face the sea and gives the rooms better orientation and shading than a straight block would have managed on the same footprint. From the ground it reads as a single gesture. From inside, it’s why your view is pointed where it is.
The base is the more unusual bit. Rather than clearing the site, the 19th-century Mercury House — the old telecoms building the whole development takes its name from — was kept and restored at street level, with the tower rising behind it, and Cold War-era vaults underneath were retained as part of the structure. Around it, the practice laid out a public square and around 25,000 square metres of shops and restaurants, in a district that had never been planned so much as accumulated.
It has not been uncontroversial. The project drew objections over its scale in Paceville, questions were raised about the consultancy that had drafted the area’s public master plan also working on the development’s engineering reports, and its financing has been picked over locally for years. None of that is visible from Level 20, but it’s part of the story of how the building got there.
If this sort of thing interests you, we’ve also written about the most beautiful and best-designed bars in the world.
Radio Rooftop Menu Review: What to Order and What It Costs
The kitchen does Japanese sharing plates with Maltese ingredients threaded through, and the menu is more interesting than a rooftop bar needs to be. There is a proper sushi counter, an izakaya section, and — thankfully — no fries anywhere on it. The sides are yaki-meshi fried Japanese rice (€8.50), yaki udon noodles and miso aubergine katsu.
Our order barely changes:
‘Yaki’ Gyoza. Pork and shiitake, ginger, soy, and Gozo honey. The Gozo honey is a small thing, but it’s the kind of detail that shows the kitchen knows where it is. There’s a prawn and white fish version, ‘Ebi’ Gyoza, if you want the lighter one.
Sashimi Selection, 10 pieces — €38. We take it all salmon. It isn’t the standard of a specialist counter — for that you want somewhere like Sushi Masa in Singapore — but for a rooftop in Malta it’s well above what it needs to be. If you’d rather have the range, the same €38 buys you the selection across salmon, hamachi, akami, o-toro and sea bass, and the Nigiri Selection is the same size and price.
Beware they may have tried to miscalculate the final price deliberately – see above.
Note that last point, because it matters later: sashimi and nigiri are both €38 for ten pieces. There is no version of this order that should come to more.
If there are more of you, the Radio Sushi Platter is 36 pieces at €98 — sashimi, nigiri, Samurai Roll, Radio Dragon Roll and Salmon Maki. Allow 20 to 30 minutes; they make the rolls to order.
Worth knowing about elsewhere on the menu: Radio Bar Oysters at €9.50 a piece with pickled red onion and red yuzu hot sauce, Bluefin Tuna Tataki, and a local sea bass tiradito with sea grapes and passion fruit. At the top end there’s an A5 Wagyu sirloin at €107.
The €65 Izakaya Menu Is Better Value Than the À La Carte
The Izakaya Experience at €65 per person runs daily from 19:00 to 23:00, minimum two people. You choose five dishes across the cold and hot sections — nigiri, sashimi, the Samurai Roll, teriyaki salmon, prawn tempura, the duck bao, the gyoza, the beef short rib harumaki — with steamed rice and a milk chocolate mousse included.
Order those five à la carte and you’re well past €65. If you’re eating properly rather than picking at something alongside a drink, take the set menu.
Cocktails, Mocktails and the Maltese Wine List
Cocktails are Japanese-leaning, named in Japanese, and priced from €12 to €28.
The house showpiece is Brian’s Rekka at €28 — milk-clarified Tottori Japanese whisky with raisin, apricot and burnt orange, and the only drink on the list at that price. Below it things are reasonable by rooftop standards: Byakuren (sake, triple sec, lychee, jasmine), and Nagasaki and Benitsuyu.
Mocktails are just €10 and are treated seriously — the Ryokuei has fresh wasabi and wasabi tonic in it.
By the standards of the rooftop and cocktail bars we’ve drunk in around Bangkok, the list is shorter and less adventurous, but the pricing is far gentler than a view like this usually commands in Europe.
Shorter than you’d expect, in fact. We counted the drinks menu properly: more than 390 positions in total, and ten cocktails and four mocktails is a very short creative list. The thing the bar markets itself on — signature cocktails — is the smallest section on the menu, while the wine program is the size of a serious restaurant’s.
There are 212 wines, including whites and reds by the bottle across eleven countries, alongside 22 gins and whiskies with nine Scottish single malts and seven Japanese. You can even try a sparkling tea from Lithuania.
The Maltese wines are the best value on the list. By the glass: Marsovin’s ‘1919’ White, Meridiana’s ‘Isis’ Chardonnay, ‘Cassar de Malte’ Brut, and the ‘101 Rosé’ Brut at €17. Maltese sparkling costs a good deal less than the champagne and is the more interesting order up here.
And one of the most popular Maltese beer Cisk is €4.50, which is roughly what a Cisk costs at sea level.
One practical note: you can pay with MeliáRewards points, at 250 points to €1.
Our Radio Rooftop Malta, St Julians Verdict: We Will Not Be Going Back
We will not go there again.
Not because of the two euros. Because we do not want to check bills every time. We want to relax in a place we trust, and that is gone now.
And if they try it on loyal customers who live round the corner and come back every few weeks — what about new customers? What about hotel guests who are here for three nights, who do not know the menu prices, who sign the slip in the dark and fly home the next morning?
The view is real. Malta from an angle you have almost certainly never seen, even if you live here. The gyoza with the Gozo honey is good, the Maltese sparkling is the best value on the list, and after dark it stops feeling like Malta at all and starts feeling like a rooftop in an Asian city.
None of that is enough. We would not recommend this place.
If you go anyway, read every line of the bill before you sign it. And if you want the quiet version of Malta instead, Casa Bonavita is the other end of the same island.
Radio Rooftop Malta: Address, Opening Hours and Booking
Radio Rooftop is on Level 20 of ME Malta, in the Mercury development on Gort Street, St Julian’s, STJ 3202. It opens at 18:00 every day, closing at 23:00 from Sunday to Thursday and at midnight on Friday and Saturday. The izakaya sharing menu runs from 19:00 to 23:00 daily and needs a minimum of two people.
You do not have to be a hotel guest. Book ahead for Friday and Saturday. Menus are on their website at radiorooftopmalta.com.
